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edit: Richard Feynman wrote a book called "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!).

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard Feynman

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

2) Shoe Dog - Phil Knight

3) Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman

No. 1 is a bit of a tricky read but completely worth it in my opinion, never have I read anything that has changed my everyday mindset so much.

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
by Richard Feynman

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

My Life and Work by Henry Ford

My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla by Ben Johnston and Nikola Tesla

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin by Charles Darwin

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

Jordan B. Peterson "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" made me more proactive and helped to summarize some past experience.

Richard Feynman "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" awesome book, about awesome life of awesome person.

2011 - In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

2012 - Born to Run, Christopher McDougall

2013 - Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss

2014 - Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon

2015 - Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins

2016 - Black Swan, Nicolas Taleb

2017 - Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman, Richard Feynman

2018 - The Prophet, Khalil Gibran

2019 - Three Body Problem (series), Liu Cixin

These aren’t publishing years, just the year these books transformed me.

- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight

- Rework by Jason Fried

- Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam

- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

- The Martian by Andy Weir

- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

What about practical, creative ideas, aka. hacks and lifehacks? Most of the people I know dismiss any 'non-standard' solution unless you actually implement it, and then force them to accept it. If you tell your idea before actually realizing it, there's no way they'll let you.

Also reminds me of stories from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - it seems that Feynman experienced this first-hand as a child, when trying to optimize some kitchen chores (one of the solutions is now sold in stores, and nobody objects it now...).

1. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", nice bio about Feynman

2. "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future", inspiring biography and business book.

3. "Apollo" by Catherine Bly Cox. Awesome book about Apollo Programm. Goes even in some technical details.

4. "Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies". Very good and thorough book about bitcoins, the author implements most import concept in the book.

5. "F'D Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts". I seldom don't recommend a book, but this one is hard to tell. It is interesting read about a lot of failed dot-com era companies. But the layout and writing style looks like an automatic rip-off of some blog articles (I read on kindle). It's not totally bad, but be warned before buying. Try some free chapters.

6. "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down", good layman general introduction into static. Nice overview why all the buildings/bridges etc around you don't fall apart.

7. "Never Eat Alone", Classics of networking. Actually basic stuff that people probably already know about networking. But still good to read, and author always shows examples on successful persons or himself.

8. "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory", reading this at the moment. Very nice and simple introduction to relativity theory and quantum mechanics. I finished around 100 pages and like it.

I read 8 books this year. My aim is around 2 books/month.

Reading can make difference.

  Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman
  What Do You Care What Other People Think? - Richard Feynman
  Crime and Guilt: Stories - Ferdinand von Schirach

  The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

  Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures - John Ellis

Not to be offensive as I can only go off of the few sentences that you have written but it would appear to me that you have the problem that you are trying to "prove" to yourself that you are smart in every encounter and this manifests by trying to be the smartest guy in the room. The smartest guys that I know will say "I don't know" when asked a question that they don't know. That to me is the essence of intellectual confidence.

* A Random Walk Down Wall Street

* Predictably Irrational

* Black Swan

* Blink

and enjoyed those too. I've also read "How To Make Friends and Influence People" and started "Lords of Finance" but never finished.

- "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", Richard Feynman

- "The hard things about hard things", Ben Horowitz

- "Shoe Dog - A Memoir by the Creator of Nike", Phil Knight

- "Bad Blood", John Carreyrou [about Elizabeth Holmes]

- "Trillion Dollar Coach" [about the life of Bill Campbell]

The way you talk makes you sound like someone who would be an awful pain in the ass to be around. Pedantic and half baked.

While technically correct your analysis is only half formed.

You have much more reading to do.

Start with these books to get a clearer idea of why you're getting a negative response to your honestly held beliefs:

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman

And some extra credit:

Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All related to having a passion for learning and life in general:

"Art of Learning" by Josh Waitzkin

"Mastery" by George Leonard

"A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart

"Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" by Richard Feynman

But... college freshman.... presumed to be "typical" ... hmm...

Maybe there's a good dictionary in that price range? The "Concise English Oxford" is about $25, though I haven't personally seen it so can't specifically recommend it.

Or, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook? Or something about how to do laundry? Or something about law for tenants in landlord-tenant relations?

Perhaps some artsy fartsy book of erotic photos?

Oh! Got it! In the same vein as "Zen and the Art of...", how about "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard Feynman?

p.s., re: "I really enjoyed superfreakenomics and Founders at Work." Which is a good reason to not recommend any books in that vein and to instead suggest books that encourage becoming mature and balanced.

- Currency Wars, James Rickards

- The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

- What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly

- The Art Of Happiness, Dalai Lama

- Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen

- The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz

- Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl

- Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky

- The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

- Good To Great, Jim Collins

- Abundance, Peter Diamandis

- The Mystery Of Capital, Hernando De Soto

- Pathologies Of Power, Paul Farmer

- Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff

- Seeing Like A State, James Scott

- Ishmael, Daniel Quinn

- Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman

- Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier

- The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

- The Birth Of Plenty, William Bernstein

The two classics are:

Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, about the Manhattan project and other places he ended up.

And Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, about the engineering effort behind the Data General Nova. This one literally has a Pulitzer.

I also enjoyed The Race for a New Game Machine, but not as much as the above books.

If you like those, check out some of her nonfiction books: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, Philosophy: Who Needs It, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (these are but a few - Rand wrote a long series of nonfiction books).

Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist by Tara Smith (a philosophy professor at UT-Austin) is excellent because it unpacks Ayn Rand's ethical system in an academic style. Finally, Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand gives a comprehensive view of Rand's entire philosophy.

Light reading (not by Objectivist authors, and not in any particular order):

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James Watson

What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman

"I can't understand anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb" questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?" But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll say something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There’s an error! That can't be right!" The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?" He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what I'm doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he's trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that's the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There’s a mistake!"

Also from the same book:

"I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) – disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn't true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, 'False!'"

>So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

From "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"